The Center for Remote Sensing and GIS “Terra” LLP was established in 1999. The main activities of the Company include provision of a package of services in the area of natural environment protection, environmental and ecological design, wildlife and subsurface resources management, forestry and settlement gardening, development and implementation of new technologies of Earth remote sensing (ERS) and geographical information systems (GIS), and conducting scientific biological, geographical, geological and ecological researches.
The Company employs highly qualified specialists of various specializations: (geographers, biologists, ecologists, geologists, soil scientists, climatologists, geodesists, topographers, land surveyors, forestry and settlement gardening specialists, programmers, programmers, photogrametters, GIS-specialists, etc.). They are engaged in learning regularities of the structure and functioning of various natural systems, ecological assessment and monitoring of environmental components.
As the Company offers a variety of services, working groups and teams are created for implementing specific projects with involvement of contractor organizations, certain specialists and experts from various research institutes, production organizations, core competence companies and agencies including foreign ones on a contract basis. This helps to considerably improve the level and quality of developments and promotes continuous training and professional development of specialists.
The Company has necessary state licenses and permits to provide all range of services offered. The Company’s quality management system is being built according to requirements of the international standard ISO 9001:2008 “Quality Management System. Requirements”.
The Company runs scientific researches on a continued basis; it is accredited as a non-governmental research institution by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The team includes 1 corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 5 Doctors of Science/Professors and 7 Candidates of Sciences. The Company is a founder and publisher of a scientific interdisciplinary magazine “Terra” issued since 2006.
CRS and GIS “Terra” has its own office building, necessary equipment, specialized software and hardware, car fleet etc. to carry out all types of works. This enables the Company to conduct state-of-the art field surveys and data processing, including creation of hi-tech modern products (cartographical models, geodata bases, geoportals, electronic control systems, etc. to meet various purposes and contexts).
Since 2014, CRS and GIS “Terra” has an ecological and analytical laboratory operating on its base. The laboratory is accredited within the accreditation system of the Republic of Kazakhstan for compliance with requirements of ST RK ISO/IEC 17025-2007 “General Requirements for competence of testing and calibration laboratories”.
The Company’s operations are specific for a wide application and introduction of modern remote sensing technologies, geographical information systems and computer-aided software and hardware complexes into various industries.
CRS and GIS “Terra” is able to promptly provide the Clients with space imagery data (ERS) of various spatial resolution, practically from all world’s operating space vehicles (satellites).
The Company’s ERS partners include leading companies of Kazakhstan, Russia and foreign countries, developers and operators of space systems, including DigitalGlobe (USA), Elecnor Deimos Imaging (Spain), Remote Sensing and Ecology Center of Chiba University (Japan), Japan Manned Space Systems Corporation (JMSSC), Innoter Geoinformation Agency, ScanEx (Russia), Ellis GeoSpatial (USA) and JSC NC Kazakhstan Garysh Sapary etc.
In recent years a new perspective direction of using ERS in geology for minerals exploration has been growing rapidly. The Company offers services in the field of geological studies, search and exploration of various types of solid minerals using modern remote sensing technologies.
CRS and GIS “Terra” cooperates with many scientific governmental and non-governmental institutions of Kazakhstan, the CIS and other foreign countries as well as international organizations. They include research institutes, departments of some universities (Russia, Uzbekistan, Switzerland, Mongolia, China, Japan) and non-governmental institutions (France, Italy, Israel, Great Britain, USA). The Company works in close collaboration with such international organizations as World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Representation of UN Development Program in Kazakhstan and Regional Ecological Center of Central Asia and others.
During the Company’s operations period (since 1999), over 300 projects have been implemented with a wide use of remote sensing and GIS technologies:
- projects under international research grants (UNECO, USAID, ISTC, GTZ, WWF, GEF/UNDP, NATO etc.)
- projects for delivery and processing of remote sensing data from various space vehicles
- environment-geared projects (for specially protected territories, biodiversity preservation, forest regeneration, sand fixation, hunting management, etc.);
- applied scientific projects in the field of ecology, biology, geology, cartography, geodesy, etc.;
- environmental (EIA, monitoring, baseline studies, recultivation of disturbed lands etc.) for public sector, oil and gas and mining industries;
- special projects for creation of GIS, electronic databases, computer-aided control systems, geoportals.
The Company’s philosophy resides in reliability, high-quality and professionalism, openness to cooperation and interaction, creation of long-term business and partnering relationships.